Hans Heysen exhibition opens at the National Gallery

Following the rock and roll madness of the Paris Masterpieces the National Gallery is announcing a more sensible exhibition for those who actually like art rather than crowds and box-ticking.

Hans Heysen, an exhibition celebrating one of the most pivotal Australian landscape artists of the early twentieth century, opens today at the National Gallery of Australia. This travelling exhibition from the Art Gallery of South Australia is the first major exhibition of Heysen’s work in over three decades, and the first to be shown in Canberra.

“Hans Heysen’s landscapes were groundbreaking in their time, and helped form the way we view the Australian landscape. Heysen made the monumental Australian gum tree the hero of his nationalistic Federation-period pictures. He later travelled many times to the rocky region of the central Flinders Ranges and from the mid 1920s added this new dry and sculptured landscape, in reds and amber, to Australian painting,” said Ron Radford AM, Director of the National Gallery of Australia.

Included in the exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia are additional Heysen works, which will only be shown in Canberra. The exhibition comprises over 80 works, including many of Heysen’s greatest oil and watercolour paintings alongside rarely seen preliminary sketches and studies.